Matt Johnson, singer, songwriter
So many people have told me that the line “This is the day your life is sure to change” is a soundtrack to a turning point in their lives that I was hoping for when I wrote it. This day is autobiographical, but I wanted to write something both personal and universal.
I was 21 and going through various life changes. I was in a new relationship with Fiona, my first real friend. I had come out of the indemnity, signed with CBS and recorded in New York, which was very exciting. My former manager and I eventually broke into hotel rooms and misbehaved, all the things you think you should do when you’re 21 and signed with a record company overseas. Drugs were involved, of course. The record company liked Uncertain Smile, so I was under a lot of pressure to come up with another single.
I wrote This Is the Day on an omnichord in Fiona’s town hall. I remember crying as I wrote it. I was very young, but I wrote from an older perspective, thinking about “reading some old letters,” “memories that hold your life together like glue,” and family members. He looks back and forth – melancholy, but hoping that things will change for the better.
The opening line “Well, don’t wake up this morning because you haven’t gone to bed / I watched the white of your eyes turn red” describes how I lived. Other images came from different parts of my life. I remembered being in a classroom bored at school watching “a plane flying through a clear blue sky.” The plane was a symbol of hope, aspiration, travel and the future and what I wanted to do with my life.
While writing and recording, I felt like a very strong song. Co-producer Paul Hardiman was a brilliant collaborator and the whole Soul Mining album used interesting instrumentation – we had marimba and cello along with guitars and synthesizers.
The song means more to me now, in a way. I lost my two brothers, my mother, and on my last tour, my father died just days before we played in London. His singing feels very emotional.
When it first came out in 1983, it peaked at number 71 or something, but it became my most successful song. I receive constant requests for its use in movies, TV dramas, documentaries, all kinds. If you could match all the plays he’s played over the years in a few weeks, he’ll probably be number one.
This is the work of the day
I worked as a session musician and went to the Garden Studios in London (owned by John Fox of Ultravox) to play keyboards, program drums and the like. Matt was recording there. At the time, playing the accordion was quite unusual, so I was asked to do a session.
Only me, Matt and Paul, the producer, were in the studio. Nowadays they send you all the music in advance, but then you just go to the studio, they play the song for you and then you just play together. If you need another try, you would do a second double or maybe try a solo. For This Is the Day, the main hook was already drawn on the violin, but otherwise it was just a case of recording hits and leaving. I think they decided at the last minute that they wanted an accordion.
At the time, it was just another one of the many sessions I was crammed into after not making any money playing for years. We made the video somewhere on the pier – I think Brighton – and it was February and cold. Not the time to play the accordion. It was obvious why the song was a single, but you never know that something will be successful or that one day you will hear it all over the world. In the United States, someone made an audio version to avoid paying for copyright. I heard it in a supermarket and thought, “Oh, it’s me,” then I listened more closely and thought, “Oh, no, it’s not!”
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